A blog about video games and not much else. Updates at intervals of time.

Saturday, November 12, 2016

The Great PokeClone-Off Part 4: Customization and Writing

There is a series that is very good at one particular thing. It excels
at long-term strategic planning. It embraces widespread personalization. It’s
the master of modification. Customization is its middle name.

…No not Custom Robo!
Customization is its first name. I am
of course talking about Pokemon. Its full name is Pocket Customization
Monsters. It had some weird parents. Or maybe they were just a fan of
underwater creatures and stealth puns.

There’s another series that’s very good at a different thing. It shines
at designing an intricate narrative. It loves crafting characters and directing
dialogue. It’s the sultan of scripting. Writing is its middle name.

…No not Pokemon! Are you kidding? This stuff is serviceable at best. I
am of course talking about…actually, I don’t even know what series I’m talking
about. I’m sure one exists out there. Somewhere. Probably. I just know it’s not Pokemon.

Today features one of these games greatest strengths and one of their
biggest unstrengths. Customization and writing, in that order. It’s almost like
this entire opening could’ve been avoided if you just read the section titles!
But of course, then you wouldn’t get to enjoy all my wacky hijinks. I think we
all know that’s what you’re here for, right? Am I right guys? Guys? You agree,
right? I’m just saying, we should hang out more. It’s not like that would kill
you! I just want to spend time with you, okay?! JUST GIVE ME A CHANCE, I CAN
MAKE THIS RELATIONSHIP WO-

Gameplay (Customization) – 15 points

For Pokemon and its imitators, customization is huge. In other games of
the genre, the focus is deliberately on a small, set cast of characters. You
can’t collect a bunch of Cloud Strifes to toss into an arena, because Cloud Strife is an
individual with his own personality and backstory and okay wow I am only just
realizing what a weird example I picked for that. Breezing right by that before
those who haven’t played Final Fantasy 7 get confused: Most turn-based RPGs
tell a specific story. They need at least some aspects of characters to be set
in stone. This also bleeds into gameplay. No matter how much customization the
game allows, they typically have things unique to specific characters. If
wouldn’t make any sense, for story or for gameplay, for each person to behave
the same in battle.

Pokemon and its ilk have no such problems. You can pile on your plate
with as many marvelous monstrosities you can find. It’s right there in the
catch phrase: “Pokemon: I must acquire the full amount!” Though this brings
about challenges in other areas like writing, it’s one of the best things about
these games. So how does each stack up in the capture and customization of
collectible creatures? Let’s find out!

Pokemon Pearl

I’ve already described much of Pokemon customization in the previous article on combat,
because the two are so intertwined it’s difficult to explain one and not the
other. The gist is that there are a ridiculous number of things to customize on
any given Pokemon. All those smaller, subtler systems do a great job to flesh
out the existing combat without adding cruft. But the focus is on two things:
The Pokemon and their moves. The hundreds upon hundreds of pocket monsters aren’t
just different visually. They all have their own stats, types, and passive
abilities.

For
example, Magikarp’s ability is Swift Swim, so it can disappoint you even faster
than normal!

Each can only know four moves at any given time. How many moves are
there? I’ll give you a hint: It’s more than four. And each individual Pokemon can learn a
hefty chunk of those techniques. The average pocket monster will only keep
about 1/5th of the moves they learn by leveling up, and 1/20th of the moves
they can learn total. And those are the conservative
estimates. Effort has also been made for a wide variety of moves to be useful
at a competitive level. In normal turn-based RPGs you can tear through spells
like toilet paper at a Taco Bell convention. When Fire3 comes along, ya aint
gonna be casting much Fire2. Pokemon does have some flat-out inferior moves,
but it’s a much smaller percentage than your typical sword-and-sorcery affair.
It also helps that instead of a magic or energy resource, individual moves have
limited uses, which are lower for more powerful techniques. If they were all
tied under one resource it’d be easy to simply spam the stronger skills.

The end result is that you and an opponent could have the exact same
team of Pokemon (unlikely to begin with) and they would still be fairly
different. This makes it a ton of fun to build a team and easy to get attached.
The latter is even clearer when the game is combined with brutal challenge runs
like Nuzlocke,
or shared experiences like the infamous Twitch Plays Pokemon. Characters,
narratives and entire mythologies spawn straight from the void. This doesn’t
happen with every game, and it’s not just popularity that lends Pokemon to it.
This game is a blank canvas uniquely personal to you.

So with all these customization options as a series, how does an
individual game break off from the pack? Well, the earlier games were missing
some combat mechanics, like passive abilities. But Pearl is equipped with just
about every one that matters, so it gets full marks there. That just leaves one
customization question left: How’s the selection?

The Pokemon of Pearl are diverse…but not as much as usual. It doesn’t
help that, strangely enough, a lot of the newcomers aren’t even available until
after you’ve beaten the game. This is bad enough, but it could’ve been
mitigated if the ranks were bolstered with the right Pokemon from previous
games. Instead of that happening, we
got a complete lack of balance in the type department. The worst off is
fire-type, which boasts a whopping two
Pokemon. One of which is a starter
option you can’t get elsewhere. If you choose a different starter, I sure
hope you like Ponyta!

There’s even a boss who specializes in fire-types! He has the two fire
Pokemon and three who are completely unrelated. They all only have one damaging
fire move. He isn’t a rare exception either. There are multiple bosses who have
Pokemon outside their type specialty. Often times areas are filled with grunts
that use the same couple Pokemon over and over. Fire isn’t the only bad
example. Electric types only have three Pokemon lines. Meanwhile, there are 18
lines of water Pokemon.

There
are two types of people in this world: Those who remember Lumineon and those
who are TELLING THE TRUTH.

Pokemon Pearl is possibly the
worst in terms of type diversity, and it seriously hampers your ability to
build interesting teams. The customization for the game is still amazing, but the
bar is set so high for the series that this flaw puts it slightly below average.
Pearl earns 9/10ths of a Pokemon for
customization.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker

With a combat system so standard and safe, the customization options in
Joker are surprisingly deep. It starts out simple enough. All monsters have
certain stats and passive traits. Most traits are far less useful than
Pokemon’s. Things like 10% increases to certain types of damage. On the other
hand, there are a few grossly overpowered traits like double the attacks or
halving the cost of all spells. So traits are all over the place, but they
aren’t the focus here. The focus is skills.

Every monster you recruit has two skillsets. One will be active, like
Huntsman or Saboteur. The other will be passive, like Attack Boost I or Fire
Ward. In both cases, the upgrades are in a set order depending on the skillset.
The difference is that active skillsets teach you new skills, like spells or
special attacks. Passive skillsets only give you bonuses to your stats. The
skills or stat upgrades you receive aren’t exclusive to one skillset. For
example, you can learn the Heal spell in the Healer skillset, but also in the Cleanser
skillset, the Defender skillset and half a dozen others. You can’t customize
skills on the individual case-by-case basis Pokemon provides, but there are
still tons of options available to you. And what makes these options so appealing
is the best feature in the game: Fusion.

Same
artist, but no.

Any two monsters above level 10 can be fused together to create a new
one. What monster results depends on the type and rank of both parents. You’re
given a choice between three new monsters so it’s not completely predetermined.
The new monster inherits some its parents stats and also half their skill
points. They can choose three skillsets out of the four from their parents and
their own two defaults. Certain skillsets even unlock upgraded versions if
their total points are maxed. For example, Attack Boost I has a max of 50
points. If Monster A has 50 points of Attack Boost I when he fuses with Monster
B, the resulting Monster C can choose Attack Boost II as one of its skillsets.
The same would happen if Monster A and Monster B both had 25 points each. With
passive skillsets this just means higher stat bonuses, but many of the
strongest spells in the game are locked behind upgraded skillsets.

Fusing monsters is a ton of fun. You’re constantly thinking of what
creations you can chain together to pass down the greatest combination of
skills. When you enter a new area with fresh monsters to recruit, you’ll want to
nab as many as possible because of the way fusion works. Even the weakest,
ugliest mess of a monster is still useful because you can link it into the
perpetual chain of breaking them down and building them up. This last point is
actually something DQM has that’s better
than Pokemon, because in those games there’s little point to catching more once
you have a team locked in.

So what’s the downside? Unfortunately, there are many. As neat skillsets
are, I find them inferior to learning individual moves. Customization is less
precise and the move sets you create are less personal. It’s also WAY less
intuitive to wrap your head around than Pokemon. To be fair, there are some
things you have to look up in Pokemon if you want to plan an optimal team. For
example, you don’t know what moves a Pokemon will learn while leveling up. DQM
has the same issue, with skillsets only displaying the first few skills in each
set. Unlike in Pokemon, you have to make tactical choices in what skills to take
past fusion, so you need that extra information to make decisions. Considering
any given skillset can have about a dozen skills total, listing the first three
is frustratingly vague.

It’d
be just as easy to tell how this spell works in English.

The bigger problem is that the skills themselves don’t tell you jack
shit. In Pokemon, when learning a move you know its power, accuracy, type, and
any special effects it may have. The skills of Joker are as opaque as a brick
wall by comparison. You don’t know how much damage moves deal, or how effective
statuses are. Sometimes it’s hard by the description to even find out what the
skill does. An example: Breath
attacks like Fire Breath are fairly common. But it wasn’t until I was looking
up unrelated info countless hours in that I found out they all do a set amount
of damage. The combination of little in-game information and a less popular
game means I couldn’t even find some of this on the internet. I legitimately
wanted to find how moves worked and dished out damage, and nowhere could tell
me.

Apart from tactical frustrations, this also has an effect on how
attached you get. It was hard enough to favor certain monsters amidst generic enemies
and palette swaps. Now we have an even bigger problem: No monster is going to
stick around for long. The best way to advance your monsters is with fusion,
and fusion straight-up destroys whatever you put into it. Even if you don’t
want to reap the benefits of the perpetual monster blender, it’s extremely
difficult to stick with a monster the whole game. Monsters have explicit ranks
in Joker. F rank monsters found early on are noticeably, statistically inferior
to the A rank monsters of end-game. It’s like if the only way to evolve your
Pokemon was to destroy them and apply some of their benefits to a completely
different Pokemon. In a world where any Pokemon could learn any move. You’re
not attached to a creature, a party member, or a character. You’re attached to
a loose collection of skills and stat bonuses.

Berserker
+ Attack Boost III + Poison Ward is my favorite character!

For all these faults, the system is still really engaging. But it’s not
just going up against any game. It’s going up against Pokemon. Competing with Pokemon on customization is like fist
fighting a cybernetic Muhammad Ali. It’s like trying to out-sprint a harrier
jet. It’s like trying to surpass Final Fantasy X-2 as emetic medicine. The bar
is set so high it got lodged in the ceiling tiles, broke through the roof,
dinged a passing airliner and is currently being observed by beings of a
distant planet as proof that they are not alone in this universe. So given
these notable flaws, I can’t give Joker any higher than 7/10ths of a Pokemon.

Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals

Here is the entirety of Spectrobe customization. Each Spectrobe has two
specific pieces of equipment you can find. One slightly increases attack and
slightly decreases defense. The other slightly increases defense and slightly
decreases attack. That’s it.

Hot damn Spectrobes, you are in some deep shit on this one.

I mean, they do have types. But there are only three types, in a very
literal rock-paper-scissors arrangement. Attacks have the same type you do, so
it’s just down to picking the right color Spectrobe. You bring two Spectrobes
into a fight and carry six overall. So optimally, you just drag along two of
each type. The only time this doesn’t work is when bosses or enemies don’t tell
you what type they are beforehand, which is more an exercise in random
frustration than anything else.

I guess…I guess there are the differences between the Spectrobes
themselves. Granted, a lot of Spectrobes with the same style of attack (ranged,
melee, charge) play very similar. But there are differences in timing and
hitboxes. These are some fun messing around with. And in a feat of actual
customization and strategy, the fact that you’ve got two Spectrobes on the field
means you can plan around which work well together. You could have AI that
works as a tank, keep a second Spectrobe you like to use in reserve or…uh, I
can’t actually think of another worthwhile strategy. But I’m sure they exist!
Y’know. Probably.

Yeah that’s the best I can do, not much else to say. Let’s just put our
heads down, toss down a quick 1/5th of a
Pokemon, and keep walking before things get too awkward.

Writing – 5 points

They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but Slash only has 70 base
power and a STAB Outrage from a Jolly nature Garchomp is like ten times that.
Checkmate, writers. Pokemon has never
put much stock in writing. It’s something they could really stand to improve.
But in some ways, it’s better off for it. This is a world that encourages
individual expression, and things might go poorly if they enforced a stricter
narrative. A sparse story can be better than a bad one.

But even in Pokemon there is some
value in writing. It still takes up a decent portion of the game, and is
therefore grounds for criticism. There’s also more to writing than plot. It’s
all those random NPCs, the setting and mythology, and the general tone of the
world. I ultimately made it worth less since it isn’t what these games focus
on, but it’s worth judging all the same. And speaking of Judgement…

Pokemon Pearl

Pokemon Pearl did something interesting with its world: It took Pokemon
as mythology to its natural conclusion. The so-called legendary Pokemon of each
game had been growing more and more grand in scale, going from epic beasts with
little purpose to embodiments of the land and sea itself. Pearl took the next
step and introduced the beings that created all of space and time. One was even
straight up Pokemon God. In principle, I have nothing against this. It opens up
potential for a lot of cool stories!

…but of course, that’s potential, and this is Pokemon. So we got a
cliché villain wanting to unmake the world and a few paragraphs of myths in a
library somewhere, and otherwise we gloss over the fact that we’re battling
with the avatars of the universe itself. The world is as video game-y as ever,
with everyone’s lives revolving solely around Pokemon and all of them being
weirdly resistant to saying anything substantial. And the saddest part is, this
was completely expected.

Behold,
the greatest of all beings, from whom the thread of the very universe
originates! You’ll see them in one scene and then they’ll cease to matter.

The games have slowly been trying for deeper plots as time goes on,
with mixed success. Pearl is right in the middle of that, and so is its story.
It’s annoyingly perfunctory. Dialogue is frequently stilted. You save the world
3/4ths of the way through, which makes the goal of becoming league champion a huge
anticlimax. But every Pokemon game does those things. I can really only think
of one game in the series that comes away notably better in the writing
department. So for doing a pretty okay job, Pearl still earns one full Pokemon.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker

Coming off of Spectrobes, the writing in Joker was a breath of fresh
air. It’s not that the plot was incredibly unique. It’s pretty dang standard
for the genre. But the game had reoccurring characters with actual personality
and some basic twists to unravel over the course of the game. Main characters
include a distant disciplinarian dad with unknown motives, a stuck-up young
taming rival, an awkward contest official, a mysterious talking monster, and
several other lesser characters with individual but very mild quirks. These
seem like a good basis for a story, and they are, but their situation is very
similar to Pokemon: They start and end at the summary. The plot is very light
and not much is done with the characters beyond the obvious. Even with the
obvious, the execution is mediocre.

At
one point an NPC outside the town shop says something like: “I went to the
store to pick up some parmesan, but accidently bought a partisan instead. I couldn’t get a refund, so I used it to stir my pasta.” For better or
worse, this is roughly the game’s best material.

That being said, the story is at least there in the first place. It gets the job done and even delivers
some amusing lines now and again. NPCs have a bit of character to them, and can
sometimes successfully pop out a pun. It’s never hilarious. It’s never
inspiring. It never pulled any major emotion out of me. But it served to string
the gameplay together and even earned a smile on a few occasions. So though I
have almost nothing to say about it, it still meets the Pokemon standard. One full Pokemon.

Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals

Describing the writing in Spectrobes is going to be…difficult. Oh, not
because it’s complex or controversial or anything like that. It’s…well let me
put it this way: You’ll need to down several cans of Monster before reading
Spectrobes. Spectrobes is getting in trouble with big pharma for being cheaper
and more effective than Ambien. Reading the Spectrobes script put me in a coma
so deep that my friends had to journey to the bowels of the Marsh Cave to
retrieve a Crystal Eye to give to a witch to brew a Magical Potion. Only then
could I be revived.

SPECTROBES IS BORING!

Everything about it is bland, predictable and completely lacking in
personality. The plot is a simplistic point A to point B affair. But that’s not
really the problem here. It isn’t doing the game any favors, but simple plots
can work. And the setting could actually be interesting if they had the slightest
desire to develop it. I can’t remember a single bit of backstory or
world-building to any location in the game beyond one planet with a mining
town. The backstory is: It’s a town where they mine things.

Characterization is the real problem here. I have some vague idea of
what personality each character should
have, but that’s purely from their visual design. Bar a couple half-hearted exceptions,
there isn’t a drop of personality represented through dialogue. If
characterization was a three-legged foot race, the character artist would be
limping along as best he could and the writer would be napping on the ground snuggling
his favorite brick of lead.

Protagonist Rallen feels like a cliché shonen anime hero, but a cheap
discount version all the edges shaved off. He’s got the right visual design for
it and a non-sequitur foreign language catch phrase (“Iku Ze!”, which
apparently is Japanese for “Let’s go!”). I think it may have also mentioned he
was kinda lazy at one point? Maybe? But the fact of the matter is, the kid is
really, unbearably bland. And no one
else fares any better! There were exactly two characters in the dozens of hours
of game with any degree of personality: The mayor of the mining town was
greedy, and one of the villains was haughty. They managed to successfully show
incredibly basic one-word personas through dialogue. That’s enough to put them
noticeably above the rest of the cast.

The
true secret to saving the world: Hair gel and angular eyeballs.

The game has zero interpersonal conflict. It has plenty of lines of
dialogue, but they’re empty of purpose or character. Most of it is just
overwritten instructions on where to go for your next video game level. The
rest are reactive lines to the tune of “This thing is good” or “This thing is
bad”. No one has an opinion about
anything. No defined ideologies, no arguments, no alternate points of view. The
villains are bad because they’re evil creatures and the heroes have no lives or
interests beyond stopping villains. I would’ve killed for a conversation about
anything other than our current objective. Talk about your hobbies, your lunch,
anything.

For fun, I decided to write a dramatization of the average Spectrobes
chapter:

Scene start: Protagonist RALLEN
and his partner JEENA are in their spaceship, fresh off their last mission.
Suddenly, they get a message from command.

COMMANDER GRANT: “Hello
protagonists.”

JEENA: “COMMANDER GRANT!”

COMMANDER GRANT: “Yes, it is I,
COMMANDER GRANT. We are picking up signs of evil bad guys doing bad things on
the planet of SMARGLEDOO.”

RALLEN: “Oh no, this is a bad
thing that has occurred, COMMANDER GRANT!”

COMMANDER GRANT: “Yes, it is a
bad thing and I also agree that it is bad. You should go stop it.”

JEENA: “We will go to the place
with bad guys and stop the bad guys, COMMANDER GRANT.”

COMMANDER GRANT: “Good yes, do
this thing that I have asked so as to stop the bad guys. COMMANDER GRANT out.”

The USS Protagonist lands on
PLANET SMARGLEDOO, which is modelled after one of several standard-issue video
game biomes. Let’s just say it’s the ice planet.

JEENA: “Here we are on PLANET
SMARGLEDOO. This is where the bad guys are doing things that are not good.”

RALLEN: “Yes it is. Bad guys who
do bad things are bad, and so I will go and stop them.”

JEENA: “Be careful, RALLEN! Bad
guys are mean and also bad, so you may have to fight them in order to prevent
the happening of an unsavory event.”

RALLEN walks through several screens
of outdoor box rooms filled with encounter tornados. He could walk right past
them, but I stop anyway to play the same fight several times over and waste an
hour of my life with a terrible paleontology mini-game. I mean uh, I don’t do
that. RALLEN does that. Or something. Whatever.

RALLEN then comes across an
OBSTACLE in his path.

RALLEN: “JEENA! There is an
OBSTACLE in my path!”

JEENA: “Be careful, RALLEN! An
OBSTACLE is undesirable due to its obstruction of progress! It looks like it’s
a CHERRY-FLAVORED OBSTACLE. You’ll need a VANILLA SWIRL SPECTROBE to bypass
this CHERRY-FLAVORED OBSTACLE.”

RALLEN: “Okay, I will acquire a
VANILLA SWIRL SPECTROBE to bypass the CHERRY-FLAVORED OBSTACLE.”

RALLEN acquires a VANILLA SWIRL
SPECTROBE to bypass this CHERRY-FLAVORED OBSTACLE. This almost certainly
involves walking all the way back to the ship to switch yours out and pad the
running time. This will be half of all the games ‘puzzles’.

RALLEN: “I am back with a VANILLA
SWIRL SPECTROBE. Now I can use it to bypass the CHERRY-FLAVORED OBSTACLE!”

RALLEN does the thing I just
said. There are some more tornado box rooms. Then a room has a bad guy in it.

JEENA: “Be careful, RALLEN! That
looks like a bad guy!”

RALLEN: “Hey you! Are you a bad
guy?!”

BAD GUY: “Hahaha! I am a bad
guy!”

RALLEN: “I do not like bad guys,
because they are bad and do bad things.”

BAD GUY: “Hahaha! Yes I do bad
things and will continue to do them.”

RALLEN: “I do not want you to do
that!”

BAD GUY: “Hahaha! I acknowledge
your discomfort in my doing of bad things, but I will nonetheless resume my
doing of these bad things because I am bad!”

RALLEN: “Curse you BAD GUY! I
will beat you and stop you from doing bad things!”

BAD GUY: “Hahaha! No, you will
not beat me! I am stronger than you, which is the inverse of the desired power
balance to result in your victory!”

RALLEN: “I shall prove you wrong
regarding the point about my abilities relative to your own! I will beat you!”

BAD GUY: “Hahaha! Now we must
fight and you will lose the fight because I will beat you and secure my
continued future in bad thing doing!”

RALLEN: “Now I will fight you and
I will not lose because I will win! Iku ze!”

RALLEN fights BAD GUY. He wins.

RALLEN: “JEENA, I have defeated
BAD GUY!”

JEENA: “That is a good thing that
has just happened, RALLEN! Now that we have defeated BAD GUY, you should come
back to the ship to see if COMMANDER GRANT has anything else for us to do.”

RALLEN: “Hey JEENA, do you ever
think we’re just a pair of hollow cardboard cutouts in the shape of vaguely
recognizable character archetypes cobbled together by an enthusiastic but
inexperienced designer of electronic entertainment and leading to a large team
of artists, programmers, designers, musicians and translators spending
thousands of hours and millions of dollars on an empty lifeless narrative that
fails to understand the most basic principles of characterization and
storytelling?”

JEENA: “Um…n-no?”

RALLEN: “Haha yeah, me neither.
Iku ze!”

Fin

This just goes to show how much the superficial details of writing
don’t matter. In Spectrobes, you play an elite member of the interstellar
police who travels the galaxy, visits strange and unique worlds, fights aliens
with a laser rifle and energy sword, and revives ancient, powerful monsters to
do battle with beings of shadow summoned from magical tornados. And it sucks! The lesson here is that it
doesn’t matter how cool your setting or plot outline appears. Maybe these
things can help determine the potential
for an interesting story, but without proper execution those details mean
nothing*.

* If you want an example of this,
you should try reading some bad fanfiction.
Or don’t. Depends how much your brain cells have it coming.

You could write a story about skateboarding dragons having dance-offs
on the moon, it doesn’t matter. If you can’t write engaging dialogue, can’t
characterize people or give them arcs, and can’t nail the fundamentals of any
particular story structure? You’re hosed. And unfortunately, Spectrobes is a
good example of that. 2/5ths of a
Pokemon.

And with that, we’re at the home stretch! The final post in this series
will deal with all miscellaneous points not covered in these first four
articles, followed by some wrapping up. I’m planning on the finale going up
next Wenesday, because the folly of man is vast as the deep ocean. Also because
no one is gonna read long articles about Pokemon when they could be playing it. Myself included.